THOMAS FLEMING -- MASTER OF MANY LITERARY ARTS

"If I had to choose one word to describe Tom Fleming as a writer, it would be master," says Sidney Offit, for two decades one of New York's most distinguished teachers of writing. "There is scarcely a literary form in which he has not demonstrated his truly amazing talent."

Fleming's thirty-seven year career as a writer amply demonstrates Offit's thesis. His nonfiction book, Liberty! The American Revolution was a December 1996 main selection of the Book of the Month Club, the History Book Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club. Sixteen years ago, his novel, The Officers' Wives was a main BOMC selection. He is the only writer in the club's 70 year history to win main selections in both fiction and nonfiction.

Fleming's early novels about big city politics in the twilight of Irish-American power have been compared to William Faulkner's in their intense preoccupation with a slice of American geography -- in Fleming's case, urban. They are rooted in personal experience. His father was a right hand man of Frank Hague, boss of Jersey City.

Packed with insiders' lore, these novels feature troubled politicians and policemen coping with racial hatreds and moral corruption. Critic and novelist Roger Dooley called the books "a powerful fictional experience that relegates other novels on big city politics to the whimsical realm."

"Every city needs a Thomas Fleming," wrote former mayor of New York John Lindsay. Kevin White, former mayor of Boston, said Fleming's Rulers of the City was the best book he had ever read about big city politics. In his native Jersey City, All Good Men, the first of these novels, is considered the definitive account of the fall of the Hague Machine.

It is hardly surprising that TV producer Thomas Lennon has made Fleming the principal commentator on his forthcoming four part PBS series, "Long Journey Home" -- a narrative of the Irish in America.

Simultaneously, Fleming launched a career as an historian. The New York Times declared his first book, Now We Are Enemies, the story of Bunker Hill, "yields to no account in sheer readability." Dean of American historians Allan Nevins said his next book, Beat The Last Drum, the story of Yorktown, was "assuredly one of the outstanding historical works of the year." The Chicago Tribune called it "a masterly historian at his masterly best."

In 1975, Fleming began blending his novelist's skills with his historian's insights. The result was Liberty Tavern, which one reviewer called "the Gone with the Wind" of the American Revolution. He followed this with Dreams of Glory, which Delaware historian John Gardner calls "the best spy novel ever written about the American Revolution -- and that includes James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy."

In these two novels, Fleming introduced the Stapleton family, a powerful New York-New Jersey clan that he has followed through American history in four other highly praised novels -- The Spoils of War, Rulers of the City, A Passionate Girl, and Promises to Keep. In September, Forge Books, a division of St. Martin's Press, published another novel in this series, Remember The Morning.

Remember The Morning describes the founding of the Stapleton clan in the tumultuous decades before the American Revolution. The story revolves around two extraordinary women (Stapleton women are frequently strong willed and intelligent) Dutch-American Catalyntie Van Vorst and African-American Clara Flowers. Linked by a girlhood as Seneca Indians -- they were captured in an early frontier clash -- they return to the white world and fall in love with the same man, a massive would-be soldier named Malcolm Stapleton. The narrative carries the reader through Indian wars and a Scottish rebellion in England and a slave revolt in New York to the eve of the Revolution. It is simultaneously a profoundly moving love story.

Margaret Truman says Remember The Morning "helps you discover the very essence of what it means to be American." Max Byrd, author of the bestselling Jefferson, calls it "an American panorama that I read with admiration and delight." The Library Journal declared it "a marvelously fresh interpretation of an era."

The Stapletons embody one of Fleming's most powerful themes -- the clash between American ideals and harsh political and economic realities, the same sort of spiritual and psychological conflict that coruscated through his Irish- American novels.

While he was launching the Stapletons, Fleming found time to master yet another literary form. His biography of Thomas Jefferson, The Man From Monticello, was listed by the New York Times as one of the outstanding books of the year 1969. He followed this triumph with The Man Who Dared The Lightning. Reviewing it, Richard D. Brown, Charles Warren Fellow at Harvard, wrote: "Thomas Fleming is to be congratulated."

The following year, Newsweek Books asked Fleming to edit Benjamin Franklin: a Life in his own Words. Arthur Schlesinger said the result was "exact in its scholarship, vivid in its evocation." Fleming's next history book, The Forgotten Victory, about the 1780 battle of Springfield, N.J., was cited by the American Association for State and Local History for "brilliantly illuminating little known aspects of state and local history." Around this time he also wrote two highly praised books for the National Park Service, The First Stroke, on the battle of Lexington-Concord, and Downright Fighting, about the battle of Cowpens.

In 1975, Fleming published 1776: Year of Illusions, a narrative of America's most momentous 12 months. Henry Bragdon of the Christian Science Monitor wrote: "Seldom if ever have I read a book I can more unreservedly recommend." The American Revolution Round Table named it the outstanding book of the year. Seven years in the research and writing, Illusions combined Fleming's remarkable narrative skills with startling insights on the War for Independence. With cool objectivity, he revealed that both sides began the year with crippling myths that the realities of the war swiftly exploded.

Next Fleming tackled an even more challenging piece of nonfiction -- a history of the U.S. Military Academy. Few books are more difficult than institutional histories. West Point, with its dozens of famous names and its century and a half participation in the life of the republic, surely ranked among the most challenging of this thorny genre. Four years later, The New York Times declared Fleming's West Point: The Men and Times of the U.S. Military Academy "the best book ever written" about the school.

Fleming says his four years at West Point put him in touch with a group of people who are virtual examplars of his favorite fictional theme, the clash between idealism and realism in American life. "These men are taught to revere Duty Honor Country, the motto of the cadet corps. But in the real world of the army, applying these ideals can often lead to heartbreak and disillusion."

Ten years after he finished West Point, Fleming published The Officers' Wives a novel about three West Pointers and the women they married. The New York Times praised the "subtlety and intelligence" with which Fleming "probed the heart of the American experience over the last thirty years." The Washington Post reviewer called it "an emotionally wrenching experience," and confessed that at its close, "I wept." Novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford expressed amazement at Fleming's "extraordinary insight into women -- their thoughts and emotions, dreams and desires, all beautifully depicted in a book I found impossible to put down." The book's combination of intense personal dramas and its marvelously rich background -- the officers and their wives grapple with the ambiguities and frustrations of the Korean and Vietnam wars -- found a huge readership. The Officers' Wives sold over two million copies worldwide.

Fleming followed this success with a novel about the U.S. Navy, Time And Tide . Here he drew on his own experience as a sailor about the USS Topeka at the close of World War II. Set in the Pacific, Time And Tide deals with the troubled captain and crew of the USS Jefferson City, a ship with a stain on her honor for ignominiously fleeing the battle of Savo Island. The New York Times called it "a blockbuster of a novel." The reviewer in the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote: "Fleming is such an astute and convincing writer-reporter that the reader can grasp the confusion, fear, desperation, venality exultation and ultimately, the heroism that exist on the Jefferson City as she sails. 'That's the way it must have been, you conclude.'" The Chicago Sun-Times reviewer compared the novel to Melville's Moby Dick.

Fleming's next novel, Over There, was a riveting account of the American experience in World War I, seen through the eyes of a disillusioned general and a feminist woman ambulance driver. New York Newsday called it "a wonderfully readable story that blends breathless action and food for thought on every fascinating page...A woman's novel for men and a man's novel for women."

Fleming followed this with an even more ambitious book, Loyalties, about an American naval officer who becomes involved with the German resistance to Hitler. The Library Journal praised it as "a thrilling story of espionage and a morality play about people forced to make compelling choices between their perceptions of good and evil." The Stars and Stripes said the book demonstrated Fleming's "powerful ability to use fiction as a way of providing readers with astonishing new perspectives on world events."

Historian Kenneth Jackson of Columbia University has put Fleming's historical novels on reading lists for his courses. Jackson considers Fleming's blend of carefully researched fact and plausible fiction an excellent way to give their students a chance to experience history's impact on individual lives.

"That is the main reason I began writing historical novels," Fleming says. "To communicate the reality of history as an experience. Most history books deal clumsily, if at all, with emotion. Yet history was lived by passionate, caring, conflicted people. I think novels of the historical imagination (a phrase he prefers to historical novel) are vital to bring the past alive."

At the same time, Fleming has continued to bring the past to vivid life for modern readers with his nonfiction. He is a frequent contributor to American Heritage magazine and the Quarterly Journal of Military History. In 1995,, the producers of the PBS television series, "Liberty! The American Revolution" asked him to write the companion volume to the series. The result is a stunning summation of the struggle for independence, sweeping across 29 years of bitter conflict and angry debate, from the coronation of George III to the inauguration of George Washington as the first president of the United States.

With more than 200 full color illustrations, this cornucopia of a book combines Fleming's trademark, a spell- binding central narrative, with a rich blend of "sidelights" that emphasize the roles of blacks, women, Indians, Irish and Jews in the revolutionary experience. Another section, "Life in the Thirteen Colonies" tells us what the Americans of 1776 were reading and wearing, what they thought about love and marriage. An especially gripping sidelight deals with the "secret war" -- the little known struggle between spies on both sides.

The History Book Club has ranked Liberty! as one of the eight best history books of the year. Amazon.com's reviewer wrote: "If you are going to include only a single book on the American Revolution in your library, this is probably the one to own. Even if you own several, Liberty! should be added to your collection." Combined with the praise for Remember the Morning, this applause proves that Tom Fleming's mastery of historical narrative continues, both in fiction and in nonfiction. _